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In Praise of Difficult Women: Medea Re-Versed and Blood of the Lamb
An ancient play reimagined in rap rhymes and a cautionary tale about post-Dobbs America.
“Who does it really cost for us to pay to see a tragedy?” Quintero asks in the show’s preface, where he introduces himself as our coryphaeus — leader of the chorus, or, to be true to the genre at hand, “the M.C.” With remarkable faithfulness to Euripides, Medea Re-Versed renders the more-than-2,400-year-old play into hip-hop, a series of high-octane flows and formal rap battles. (A quintessential run: “Well, some god gets off on damning me / I’m in my palace plannin’ on plantin’ seed / When some deity devitalized my phallus, see, / Which makes a family for me a fallacy.”) Spencer, meanwhile, fills Medea’s golden-boy-narcissist of a husband, Jason, with an itchy, nasty aggression thinly masked with California bro chill. The scenario it depicts, says Bordelon in her director’s note, “began as a work of speculative fiction, but [grows] closer to realism with each passing day.” Inside the bland, cramped, institutional box of the play’s set — its cheap furniture and glaring fluorescent lights well curated by Andrew Boyce — two women meet.
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